How Facebook Seduced Billions of Users

There is much research on how basic human behavior has led to the success of Facebook. This is a short exploration of three factors.

Facebook watches everything. Image credit: Wall Street Journal

Facebook is Free! So It Must Be Good!

First, research by TotalMoney has revealed that 40 percent of Facebook users do not realize that the company is selling information about them.

In fact half those surveyed said they would leave Facebook if it did so, and 60 percent of 18 to 24 year olds said they would leave.

Considering that, as of December 2017, Facebook had 2.2 billion registered users, 40 percent is a lot of people. That may well be because a lot of stuff on the internet is free, and so potential users pass on research and just take it as a given that this is one more of those splendid free services.

This psychology is discussed in Fastcodesign: “Admit It, You Don’t Really Understand Facebook.” It gets right to the point.

Ask the next five people you meet (who don’t work in tech) how they think Facebook really made more than $40 billion in revenue last year. Most people can happily tell you that Apple stays in business by selling phones and laptops, Ford sells cars, and NBC commercials. But when it comes to the internet–the foundation of the 21st century economy–it’s a struggle for normal people to articulate how companies like Facebook can be so successful when the services and news they provide are free.

Of course, Facebook didn’t have to go with free. The company could have charged a fee for its services, but the company realized that any cost at all would be harmful to the business model it constructed. The ostensible explanation is that potential users who have smartphones, pay monthly carrier fees and a monthly ISP bill just wouldn’t be able to afford Facebook. For more background see: “Mark Zuckerberg Says Privacy Is for the Rich.”

Information Overload & Indecision

A second factor that comes into play is the well-known effect of how information overload can lead to decision paralysis or what psychologists call “decision fatigue.” See this U.S. News article: “The Hazards of Decision Overload.” This effect leads to no decisions or bad decisions.

Research has found that having to make too many decisions can deplete willpower or self-control, causing you to avoid certain choices or to make ones that don’t sync with your long-term goals and values.

…

The depletion of self-control or willpower is “like a muscle getting tired: The longer and harder you work it, the more tired it will get,” explains Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Florida State University…

In other words, at the very time when Facebook (and other social media systems) customers should be spending their time making conscious decisions about how to allocate time and resources, they are increasingly overloaded by new and tantalizing features, kitten videos, opportunities to post family photos, apparent outrages, and news about everything that’s happening to everybody. To name a few.

The outward trimmings, fascinations and rewards of the service both serve to distract and deter the user from making more deliberate decisions about the scope of their activities. It’s basically an addiction, and escape routes are something to be avoided thanks to decision paralysis.

Next page: Two psychological biases used. And some ways out.

Confirmation Bias and Cognitive Bias

A third factor that comes into play is the process of human decision making.

The first is called Confirmation Bias. From Wikipedia.

Confirmation bias … is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs.

Daniel Kahneman

Facebook appeals to confirmation bias by profiling users and assisting with grouping them into clans that support each other’s views. Outsiders are deemed to be ill-informed. Or worse.

The second effect is called Cognitive Bias. I ran across this when I read a book about the famous Israeli-American psychologist who studied the psychology decision-making, Dr. Daniel Kahneman.

I explored just a small part of his work in: “How Can Amazon Echo Look Possibly Succeed? It’s Easy.” and also: “How Can We Tell if Our Love for Apple is Logical or Biased?” One of the key findings by Dr. Kahneman is this:

 

When people want something bad enough, they’ll underestimate the risks.

And so the art of marketing is to persuade customers that the benefits are huge and the risks are non-existent. When combined with information overload, the customer does nothing to escape and rationalizes the perceived gains  — even if direct experience suggests otherwise.

Facebook Remedies: Finding a Way Out

The article at U.S. News (cited above) has some suggested remedies for information overload. Limit options, offload choices, and buy more time for certain activities. You can read the details there.

In terms of decision making, I believe it’s wise to read many different sources with different methods. Confining one’s news reading to Facebook pigeon-holes the perspective. Read reputable news sites in a browser and news apps in which you select the sources. Follow a wide range of opinions on Twitter. Subscribe to magazines and publications that provide respected view points from accomplished, educated people.

Most of all, develop an understanding of how Facebook fundamentally operates, both in its financial and psychology models. Armed with all this, and all the recently published provisions for limiting how Facebook exploits information about us, we may have a renewed, fighting chance to avoid being sold as product while still reaping the rewards of beneficial social contact.

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